Francesco Santurini impresario d’opera a Venezia (1674-1683)

Abstract

The impresario Francesco Santurini quondam Antonio had gone down in history both by founding the Teatro di Sant’Angelo (1677), one of the long-lived and more lively opera theatres in Venice, and by reducing the ticket price to one quarter of a ducat. His marketing strategy, experimented back at the Teatro di San Moisè between 1674 and 1675, and realized at Sant’Angelo for seven years, made a small price revolution in the Venetian opera business. Through notarial and judicial acts, letters, literary sources, and ‘journalistic’ reports, it is possible to reconstruct a documentary balance of the business of Santurini as impresario until 1683. So it can be shown that, after deducting his new economic strategy, his productive effort and the quality of the spectacle offered by his theatre achieved a competitive level, at the cost of going bankrupt.